Any time your team suffers through its longest losing streak in 73 years, it's cause for (at least some) consternation. The Dodgers lost 11 games in a row, and 16 out of 17. Despite carrying the best record in baseball, L. A. has some real issues, including unsettled situations at second base and in center field, and a starting rotation that's absolutely dripping with talent, but also clocking tons of injuries this year.Watch a historic winning streak or painful losing streak occur just a few weeks away from the start of the playoffs, and the natural reaction becomes... overreaction. Cleveland is on fire, and that momentum will carry into October, where World Series glory surely awaits. The Dodgers are falling apart, and a team that's endured multiple doses of heartbreak in recent postseasons will surely experience another one this year.Fret not, Dodger fans. And don't get ahead of yourself, Cleveland fans. For all our obsession with who's hot and who's not, there's no evidence Baltimore Orioles Pedro Alvarez Jersey 2017 to suggest that how you play heading into the playoffs has any bearing on what happens once you're actually in the playoffs. Nor do gigantic winning streaks automatically portend October success.Looking at all World Series winners in the expansion era (1969-2016), we found that there's no significant correlation between late-season success and playoff success. Research by Rob McQuown of Baseball Prospectus showed that whether you look at the final 10 games of any given season, or longer intervals, teams that roll into October on a hot streak aren't significantly more likely to make deep playoff runs than teams that reach the playoffs struggling through a cold snap. (This confirms another study that Neil Paine and I did for FiveThirtyEight back in 2014. )#).